A Feature-Oriented Software Engineering Approach Supporting Extension and Testing

Denham, Jeremy E

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A Feature-Oriented Software Engineering Approach Supporting Extension and Testing

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Software Engineering represents a structured, disciplined approach to the design and implementation of software systems. Adhering to such an approach enables greater planning for and management of systemic complexity. By augmenting the process to emphasize desired features that are to be present in the final software system, we can ensure that the final system will be modular, extensible, and testable with respect to individual features. Moreover, an existing system can be characterized according to its features and refactored in the same way. This thesis investigates feature-oriented augmentation to the standard software engineering approach. We employ logic-based feature models to characterize the features in the product family of an existing system. We use the characterized features to refactor a case study to reflect the approach using aspects. We demonstrate using the AspectJ Eclipse plugin how to publish different frameworks in a framework product line. Our results show that the refactoring efforts produce a modular, extensible, and testable system in which individual behavioral features selected from a product family of features can be added to or subtracted from the system with ease.

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